2.

REBOURS: RICHARD POPKINS CONTRIBUTIONS

TO INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

Allison P. Coudert

Some readers of this essay will be old enough to remember the Shmoo, the
cartoon character created by Al Capp. But you may not know that it morphed
into a popular toy in the 1940s, which was basically a large plastic balloon
in the shape of a bowling pin with a weight in the bottom.1 Whenever you
punched it, it always popped right back up. That is my vision of my friend
Dick Popkin in the last, unbelievably productive years of his life: emphysema,
pneumonia, failing eyesight all things that would fell a lesser man could not
keep him down. In 2000, Dick was invited by David Ruderman, the Director
of the Institute of Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania,
to the final conference culminating a year of seminars devoted to a subject
that Dick had helped pioneer, Christian Hebraism and the relation between
Christians and Jews in the early modern period. In the months preceding the
conference it was nip and tuck whether he would be up to making the trip
from Los Angeles to Philadelphia. But with his new motto, have oxygen,
will travel, he and his wife Julie arrived in style. And after a day of intense
conferencing, without a note or moment of hesitation Dick summed up what
had been said by the conferees and suggested areas for further research. It
was just one more of Dicks stunning virtuosic performances.
I met Dick at the Clark Library in 1984, where I worked up the courage
over several days to give him offprints of two articles. At that point I had no
reason to think that Dick would be any different from most accomplished academics, somewhat loathe to take handouts from unknown scholars, especially

Shmoon memorabilia generated 25 million dollars in the 1948 (about 300 million
in 2003 terms). Denis Kitchen apparently has the largest collection of Shmoon memorabilia in the world: I collected this stuff myself and its across the board. It includes
ashtrays, birthday cars, boys belts, womens brooch pins, charm bracelets, drinking
glasses, earmuffs, Grape Nuts cereal, household deodorizers, puzzles, glass milk bottles, songs and large plush Shmoo dolls. One of the weirdest ones is fishing lures.
(http://forum.newsarama.com/archive/index.php/t-1114.html).
1

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ones working on esoteric subjects like the Kabbalah and witchcraft. But, as I
quickly learned, Dicks skeptical and inquisitive bent inclined him to question
prevailing wisdom and Whiggish interpretations when it came to understanding the past. Like two other great scholars of the twentieth century, Gershom
Scholem and Frances Yates, he saw himself as something of an archeologist,
digging deep in what he has described as the marvelous and varied intellectual world or swamp which lies beneath our present thinking to ferret
out little known figures, whether they be neglected persons from the past or
unrecognized scholars of the present. It was at the margins, in the writings of
ignored and neglected figures, that Dick found ideas now seen to be central
to our understanding of the transition from the early modern to the modern
world. His cri de coeur from the very beginning was that philosophy has a history; it was not born fully formed like Athena from Zeuss or any great philosphers head. It cannot be understood unless contextualized, and once this is
done our view of the past is radically changed. Good science did not develop
when bad religion, bad magic, or bad metaphysics disappeared. Good science
was the product of a multitude of events and motivations among which were
the recovery of Greek and Roman skeptical texts during the Renaissance,
strands of esoteric kabbalistic, hermetic, and neoplatonic thought, millenarianism, and even messianism, all of which combined to produce a heady brew
that placed man at the center of the universe. Religion played an essential
role in this transformation. From the lowly worm postulated by Luther and
Calvin, who could do nothing to mollify an angry God or contribute to his
own salvation, mankind took on the pivotal role of restoring the world to its
prelapsarian perfection; and science was the means to this end. By focusing
on the margins, or at least by bringing the margins into the story, Dick has
recovered large chunks of history lost to view, submerged in the swamp, just
waiting to be excavated. And this led him to a number of startling and remarkable discoveries. Let me list five of them: (1) Spinozas possible connection
with the Quakers; (2) Cardinal Ximenes learning Aramaic so he could speak
to Jesus; (3) two small treatises by Abraham Cohen Herrera on method that
anticipated Descartess discussion of clear and distinct ideas; (4) Isaac de Pintos dinner with David Hume; and (5) Columbuss connection with Jews and
even the possibility of his Jewish ancestry. This last point was developed by
Dick in several lectures, one of which he gave at Arizona State University in
1988 with the irresistible title that only he would have dreamed up, Columbus and Corned Beef.
These and many more equally revolutionary discoveries stemmed from
Dicks initial interest in skepticism, the work for which he is undoubtedly most
famous. It seems ludicrous now to think that before Dick, no major historian
of philosophy was aware that there was a skeptical crisis in early modern
Europe or cognizant of the role it played in shaping modern philosophy.

 Rebours: Richard Popkins Contributions to Intellectual History

17

Furthermore, no one before Dick was aware of the role that Jewish converts
to Christianity and Marranos like La Peyrre played in this skeptical crisis,
the French Renaissance, Napoleons Jewish policy, the emancipation of the
Jews, and the assault on revealed religion. Not content with simply tracing the
contours of skepticism from the Renaissance onwards, Dick recognized that
in addition to Marranos there were whole groups of philosophers, theologians,
and scientists left out of the picture, figures like the Cambridge Platonists and
Comenius, those described by Charles Webster as the spiritual brotherhood
but whom Dick referred to as the Third Force in early modern history. These
thinkers were united in their quest to overcome the skeptical crisis ensuing from the rediscovery of classical texts and the bitter sectarian conflicts
accompanying the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. The interpretation
of the Bible was central to their worldview, and they were deeply influenced
by various currents of esoteric and mystical thought. They were united in their
deeply held religious convictions, their view of the millennium as imminent,
and of science as a crucial tool in hastening its advent. From this Dick came
to the conclusion that Christian millenarianism and Jewish messianism were
potent creative forces in seventeenth century thought, an idea that has been
borne out by subsequent scholars. Henry More, Isaac Newton, William Law,
William Whiston, Andrew Michael Ramsey, Hartley, Priestley, Swedenborg,
and even Balfour were all part of this Third Force, whose historical influence only began to be appreciated and more fully investigated as a result of
Dicks prodding.2 Our understanding of early modern philosophy, theology,
science, and history has changed radically as a result of Dicks many scholarly
endeavors. He has made it clear for all to see how central religion was in the
transition from the early modern to the modern world. One of his students
quotes him as saying that the problems of the world are not really political,
economic, or social; they are religious. To change the world you must change
the hearts of human beings.3 After September 11, 2001 this statement seems
uncannily on the mark. So, in addition to Dicks role as incomparable scholar,
convener of conferences exceptional, and generous friend and mentor, we can
add that of prophet and philosopher in his own right.

When discussing the Third Force I should also mention the Fourth Force,
namely James Force. I recall him driving up to a Clark Conference in his 1960
Oldsmobile convertible and coining the term Popkinettes to describe people like us
who were so devoted to and influenced by Dick.
3
Richard H. Popkin, Intellectual autobiography: warts and all, The Sceptical
Mode in Modern Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Richard H. Popkin, eds. Richard A.
Watson and James E. Force (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1988), 146.
2

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Chapter 2

In thinking how to define Popkins contribution to scholarship, I was struck

by the family resemblance that exists between his work and that of two other distinguished scholars I referred to earlier, Frances Yates and Gershom Scholem.
In significant ways all three were heretics inasmuch as they went against
the grain of accepted scholarship by emphasizing the centrality of what other
scholars had marginalized, denigrated, or ignored. As I mentioned, Dick
was fascinated by what he referred to as the swamp which lies beneath our
present thinking. Scholem had a similar penchant for delving into uncharted
regions. He was convinced that one had to excavate traditional history to get
to the truth hidden below the surface, and he discovered the sources of this
hidden truth well beyond the borders of orthodoxy:
There are domains of [tradition] that are hidden under the debris of centuries and lie there waiting to be discovered and turned to good use . there
is such a thing as a treasure hunt within tradition, which creates a living
relationship to tradition and to which much of what is best in current Jewish
consciousness is indebted, even where it wasand isexpressed outside of
the framework of orthodoxy.4

Scholem was much more interested in what he called the failures of history
than in its so-called successes. As he said:
If I were called upon to teach, I would try to show that Jewish history has
been a struggle over great ideas and the question is to what extent we should
be influenced by the degree of success achieved in that struggle .At the
same time, I would consider with my pupils the failures of history, matters
having to do with violence, cruelty and hypocrisy.5

David Biale describes this orientation of Scholems work as counter-history, which does not revise history so much as suggest that the vital forces
which propel history forward lie in a secret tradition beneath the surface of
mainstream or establishment history.6

4
Cited in David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 210211.
5
Ibid., 108.
6
Ibid., 1112: Counter-history [is] the belief that the true history lies in a subterranean tradition that must be brought to light. Counter-history is a type of revisionist
historiography, but where the revisionist proposes a new theory or finds new facts, the
counter-historian transvalues old ones. He does not deny that his predecessors interpretation of history is correct but he rejects the completeness of that interpretation:
he affirms the existence of a mainstream or establishment history; but believes
that the vital forces lies in a secret tradition.

 Rebours: Richard Popkins Contributions to Intellectual History

19

Yates shared this same conviction that true history was subterranean. Like
Popkin and Scholem, she saw herself as an archeologist, whose excavations
among the ruins of the past revealed the truth that lay beneath what she
described as superficial history. As she writes in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment:
One way of looking at the explorations of this book is to see them as having uncovered a lost period of European history. Like archeologists digging
down through layers, we have found under the superficial history of the
early seventeenth century, just before the outbreak of the Thirty Years War,
a whole culture, a whole civilization, lost to view, and not the less important
because of such short duration.

Yates pursued the theme of lost history throughout all her work. She
describes her quest in poignant terms in her great book The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century:
history as it actually occurs is not quite the whole of history, for it leaves
out of account the hopes which never materialized, the attempts to prevent
the outbreak of wars, the futile efforts to solve differences by conciliatory
methods. Hopes such as these are as much a part of history as the terrible
events which falsify them, and in trying to assess the influence of their times
upon idealists and lovers of peaceful activities such as our poets and academicians the hopes are perhaps as important as the events.7

Like Yates and Scholem, Popkin turned to what was deemed irrational by
many scholars in constructing his own counter-history. I do not use the term
irrational in the sense of unreasonable but to describe intuitive and essentially religious forms of cognition rather than those based on empiricism or
deduction which are expressed in symbolic images rather than logical propositions. Scholem was convinced that myth and religion were more important
sources of human creativity than reason alone: Reason is a great instrument
of destruction. For construction, something beyond it is required . I believe
that morality as a constructive force is impossible without religion, without
some power beyond pure reason.8 As Biale points out, however, Scholem
did not glorify irrationalism, being well aware of its destructive potential:
Scholem believes in the rational regulation of irrationalism, and in his historiography he strives for a rational account of the history of irrationalism.9 I
think the same can be said of Frances Yates and Dick Popkin.
Frances A. Yates, The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London:
The Warburg Institute, 1947), ch. 10.
8
Biale, Gershom Scholem, 115.
9
Ibid.
7

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Chapter 2

In many respects the shared interest of these three scholars in delving

beneath the surface to find the unrecognized forces activating the past had its
roots in the Romantic fascination with the irrational, the subconscious, and the
unconscious.10 As Popkin pointed out in his introduction to Millenarianism and
Messianism in English Literature and Thought, interest in subjects like magic,
the occult, alchemy, millenarianism, and messianism was reinforced by events
in the twentieth century, not least of which were the atrocities of World War I,
Nazism, and Communism. Such stark instances of irrationality made scholars
like Yates and Scholem, as well as Popkin, more attuned to irrational elements
in the more distant past and to the role these elements played in shaping both
our enlightened and unenlightened history.11
When one thinks about the factors that drove Popkin as well as Scholem
and Yates to direct their historical investigations to areas beyond the borders of orthodoxy, biography becomes important. In his two autobiographical
essays Popkin describes himself as by nature rebellious. He rebelled against
his parents dogmatic liberalism, anti-religion, and communist world view.
This rebelliousness continued at Columbia, where he rejected John Deweys
instrumentalism and Frederick Woodbridges naturalism. It wasnt until he
discovered Sextus Empiricus that things began to fall into place. As he says in
a passage that makes both Francis Bacon and Karl Marx jump to mind:
In my own case, I guess that I feel perpetually an outsider and an outcast,
ready to smash intellectual idols at any time. An intellectual anarchist
might describe this view, who feels the common human bond would be
revealed if our intellectual chains were broken and our deceptive glasses
removed. Theories would be seen as myths with no supra-human dimension.
Only the supra-human experience found in religious experience and
aesthetic experience transcends this. But any interpretation puts one back
in Platos cave looking at shadows and illusions.12

For some brief but perceptive remarks on Scholems reaction against, yet indebtedness to, German Romanticism, see Arnaldo Momigliano, Essays on Ancient and
Modern Judaism, ed. Silvia Berti, trans. Maura Masella-Gayley (Chicago, IL: Chicago
University Press, 1994), 194196.
11
Biale describes Scholems rejection of bourgeois liberalism and the rationalism
of nineteenth century Germany historiography. Scholem is, he says, unquestionably
the product of the romantic revision of the Wissenschaft des Judenthums, which took
place in Central and Eastern Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century
(35). For the effect of Germanys defeat in World War I on German historians and the
concept of objectivity and rationalism, see G.G. Iggers, The Dissolution of German
Historicism, in Ideas in History: Essays in Honor of Louis Gottschalk by his Former
Students, ed. Richard Heer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965).
12
Popkin, Intellectual autobiography, 147.
10

 Rebours: Richard Popkins Contributions to Intellectual History

21

In this same essay Popkin described himself as equally alienated from the irreligion of his parents and traditional Judaism. Somewhat ironically, skepticism
came to his rescue by allowing him to connect with an element from the Jewish
past that had been marginalized and denigrated, namely the Marranos. He
describes the excitement and personal satisfaction with which he discovered
this aspect Jewish history:
From Grayzel to Cecil Roth to more scholarly works, I plunged into the
world of the Marranos, and literally felt myself growing roots that connected me to this tradition of secret Jews, forced converts, who had functioned in an alien world, always threatened by it. I saw the conception of
the Marrano, outwardly conforming to the culture around him but internally guarding the true faith, as most appealing. As I learned that Santa
Teresa, San Juan de la Cruz, some of the early Jesuit mystics, were all from
forced convert families, I felt an overpowering need to explore this world.
The mysticism of Santa Teresa and San Juan de la Cruz seemed closest to
what I had experienced.13

Scholem had followed a similar path a generation earlier. He too revolted

against both the irreligion of his parents and traditional Judaism, but instead
of being drawn to Marranos, he was attracted to Jewish mysticism and the
Kabbalah, or to what the distinguished historian Heinrich Graetz had dismissed as gibberish and a book of lies.14 While Popkin described himself
as an intellectual anarchist, Scholem called himself a religious anarchist,
but both sought an authentic encounter with Jewish tradition in non-canonical Jewish sources. In a talk in 1939 Scholem described the kind of anarchism
he and some of his colleagues experienced:
Our anarchism is transitional .We are the living example that this [anarchism] does not remove one from Judaism. We are a generation not without
commandments, but our commandments are bereft of authority. But I dont
have an inferiority complex vis--vis the Orthodox. We are no less legitimate than our forefathers, they simply had a clearer text. We are perhaps
anarchists, but we are opposed to anarchy.15

Through his scholarship, Scholem encountered a new kind of authentic Judaism. He was able to show that what had once been viewed as embarrassing
aberrations of Jewish culture, namely mysticism and messianism, were potent

Ibid., 117.
Paul Mendes-Flohr, ed., Gershom Scholem: The Man and his Work. SUNY Series
in Judaica: Hermeneutics, Mysticism, and Religion (Albany, NY: SUNY/The Israel
Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1994), 40.
15
Ibid., 17.
13
14

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Chapter 2

elements in shaping Jewish history. In his view Zionism brought an end to

apologetics. Those aspects of Judaism once denigrated had to be reevaluated:
Forces whose value was once denigrated will appear in a different light.
Forces which were not considered important enough for serious scholars to
research will now be raised from the depths of concealment. Perhaps what
was once called degeneracy will now be regarded as a revelation, and what
seemed to them {the apologetic scholars of the nineteenth century] to be an
impotent hallucination will be revealed as a great vibrant myth.16

Popkins scholarly work has contributed to a similar reevaluation of ignored

and denigrated areas or research in Jewish and Western history. Like Scholem,
he recognized the significance and importance of religious forces in the emergence of the modern world. By 1987, he realized that the focus of my work was
on documenting the religious background of modern philosophy.17 One thing
led to another until a new structure of interlocking intellectual currents emerged,
bringing with it a new understanding for the religious roots of modernity:
what still amazes me is that in running amok in researching different
aspects of these subjects, new, encompassing structures emerge. It is not a
grab bag of research, but a growing history of skepticism, of Jewish intellectual history, of Jewish-Christian relations, that appears connected, and
important in understanding how our present intellectual world emerged,
and the sort of tensions it contains. I hope that showing this forces us to
consider what we should and can do about it.18

Like Scholem, Popkin recognized that millenarianism and messianism were key
factors in early modern history. But while Scholem distinguished Jewish messianism from Christian on the grounds that Jewish messianists anticipated a cosmic rather than a personal redemption, Popkin studied and encouraged others
to study the ways in which Christians and Jewish millenarians and messianists
worked in tandem to prepare for a cosmic redemption and in so doing interacted in ways that helped to lay the foundation for enlightenment thought.
Like Scholem and Popkin, Yates early work linking occultism, Hermeticism, and science was also radical and went against the grain of contemporary wisdom in the history of science. To remind you just how radical her
approach was, I quote from George Sartons three volume Introduction to
the History of Science, which, although written between 1927 and 1947, was
Ibid., 24.
Popkin, Intellectual autobiography, 145. This appears in his article, The Religious
Background of 17th Century Philosophy, Journal of the History of Philosophy 25
(1987): 3550.
18
Popkin, Intellectual autobiography, 146.
16
17

 Rebours: Richard Popkins Contributions to Intellectual History

23

still required reading when I went to college. Sartons unequivocal dismissal

of magic reveals his Whiggish orientation:
The historian of science can not devote much attention to the study of
superstition and magic, that is, of unreason, because this does not help him
very much to understand human progress. Magic is essentially unprogressive and conservative; science is essentially progressive; the former goes
backward; the latter forward.19

Another respected historian of science and magic, Lynn Thorndike, took

the same pejorative view of magic. He attributed what he saw as a decline
in science during the fifteenth century to the rise of Renaissance humanism
and renewed interest in magic and superstition. He consequently pushed
the scientific revolution back from the Renaissance to the twelfth century, a move applauded by other historians who accepted Pierre Duhems
claim that the root of modern science lay in the Middle Ages. Interestingly
enough, in her autobiographical notes Yates mentions that when she began
working on Giordano Bruno and was invited by Edgar Wind to use the
Warburg library, the first thing she read was Duhems work, from which,
she says, I derived the general idea that science was medieval and the
Renaissance and humanism impeded rather than helped it.20 That Yates
should so radically reverse her own initial position and in doing so challenge bona fide historians of science is all the more interesting because her
field was literature, not science, and not even the history of science, a fact
that offended and continues to offend a number of historians of science.21

19
George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, 3 vols. (Baltimore, MD:
Williams & Wilkins, 19271947), 1: 19.
20
Yates, Ideas and Ideals in the North European Renaissance (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1984), 313.
21
The fact that Yates was not a historian of science was held against her and the
many other scholars who crossed into the discipline from other fields. As Charles C.
Gillispie put it, The history of science is losing its grip on science, leaning heavily on
social history, and dabbling with shoddy scholarship. Cited in Allen G. Debus, Science and History: The Birth of a New Field, in Science, Pseudo-Science, and Utopianism in Early Modern Thought, ed. Stephen A. McKnight (Columbia, SC: University of
Missouri Press, 1992), 29. On this issue, see William J. Broad, History of Science Losing
Its Science, Science 207 (1980); Paul Wood, Recent Trends in the History of Science:
The Dehumanisation of History, British Society for the History of Science Newsletter
(September, 1980); Leonard G. Wilson, Medical History without Medicine, Journal
of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 35 (1980); Ronald L. Numbers, The
History of American Medicine: A Field in Ferment, Reviews in American History 10
(1982): 245264.

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Chapter 2

What, one wonders, made Yates jump across accepted disciplinary boundaries
and study a subject namely magic and the occult that was conspicuously
not studied at the time precisely because it was deemed senseless and illogical?
As in the case of Scholem and Popkin, biography is useful here. Although
the unfortunately few fragments we have of Yates memoirs dont throw
direct light on this question, they do provide suggestive hints. For example,
they describe her unconventional education, which during her early years
occurred largely at home under the direction of her mother and sisters.
She considered this escape from regular education a marvellous good
fortune.22 When she eventually went to university it was as an external
student, which meant she had minimal contact with professors and other
students. Even as an internal student working on her M.A., she lived outside
of London and claims that I was largely left to my own devices.23 There was
thus something of the solitary maverick about Yates that conceivably made
her more independent-minded than most students and more willing to follow
her own insights.24
There are further hints in her autobiographical fragments that provide clues
to the unconventional direction Yates scholarship would take. Writing about
the death of her brother during a bayonet charge on October 8, 1915, she says
dramatically, The 19141918 war broke our family: as a teenager I lived among
the ruins.25 Literally and figuratively Yates did live among ruins, not only as a
teenager but for the remainder of her life, first as a young woman experiencing
a irreparable rupture in her own family and the ruin of pre-World War I culture
and later as a historian and Warburg scholar. It was, after all, the declared mission of the Warburg Institute to study and document the survival of the classical
tradition. Yates took this injunction to heart. As I have already mentioned, she
saw herself as an archeologist, whose excavations among the ruins of the past
revealed the truth that lay beneath superficial history.
There is another important respect in which Yates scholarship goes hand in
hand with Popkins and Scholems. I would argue that the most direct and lasting legacy of all three scholars has been two-fold: in helping to integrate Jewish
Studies into the wider field of Western history and in stimulating the new field

Yates, Ideas, 277.

Ibid.
24
According to J. Franklin Jameson, one of the avowed ends of the professional
training of historians was decidedly not, to evoke originality, to kindle the fires of
genius but to regularize, to criticize, to restrain vagaries, to set a standard of workmanship and compel men to conform to it. Cited in Peter Novick, That Noble Dream:
The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), 52.
25
Yates, Ideas, p. 276.
22
23

 Rebours: Richard Popkins Contributions to Intellectual History

25

of Esoteric Studies, which has fundamentally changed our understanding of

the historiography of science. Moshe Idel considered Yates willingness to admit
the formative role of the Kabbalah in Renaissance and post-Renaissance history courageous and quite extraordinary. He credits Yates with encouraging Jewish studies in the areas of magic, the occult, and Kabbalah and claims that
Yates work stimulated his own as well as that of other Jewish scholars working
on similar subjects.26 Wouter Hanegraaff, one of the leaders in the new field of
Western Esotericism, ascribes a similar role to Yates. He described the publication of Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition as the decisive turningpoint for the study of Western Esotericism and sees her work as legitimizing
fields of study which had previously been marginalized, if not ridiculed.27
I think that what we can all see at this point is that Richard Popkins work,
like Yates and Scholems, has profoundly influenced our historical view of
Jewish-Christian relations as well as our conception of European intellectual
history and the history of science. While I agree wholeheartedly with Margaret Jacob that it is too drastic to give up the idea of a scientific revolution,28
we are now in a position to define this revolution in far more nuanced terms,
just as we can now more fully appreciate the complexity of the intellectual
changes that led from the pre-modern to the modern world. We can do this
largely because of the three scholars I have discussed and the work their work
has inspired.

Moshe Idel, private communication, 1999.

Western Esotericism, introduction.
28
Margaret C. Jacob, The Truth of Newtons Science and the Truth of Sciences
History: Heroic Science at Its Eighteenth-Century Formulation. In Rethinking the
Scientific Revolution, ed. Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), 315332.
26
27